Sea-Intelligence has found that capacity changes on the Asia-North Europe trade route have become highly volatile, with a significant increase in the variability of vessel capacity over the past decade.
The firm has estimated the standard deviation of the weekly change in capacity over a 52-week period, highlighting that these weekly swings can be rather severe-particularly during Chinese New Year and Golden Week-making it difficult to identify underlying trends.
The figure below depicts the relationship between Asia and North Europe.
Sea-Intelligence truncated the y-axis to ensure that the pandemic-induced increase did not overshadow the longer-term data.
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Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence, commented: “What we see here is that the volatility in the vessel capacity on the Asia-North Europe trade has grown quite significantly over the past decade, from a semi-stable level around 10 per cent pre-pandemic, to presently a level three times that magnitude.
“This means that the ability for shippers to rely on a stable level of capacity on the Asia-North Europe backbone trade has been eroded considerably, which in turn calls for the need for better contingency planning, even when the market has sufficient scheduled capacity.”
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Transpacific trades, on the other hand, have not been as volatile as Asia-North Europe, with Asia-North America West Coast now appearing to be more reliable in terms of weekly capacity given to shippers.
This contrast is seen in the figure below.
Over a 52-week period from September 2023 to August 2024, the weekly offered capacity in Asia-North Europe has a standard variation of over 90,000 TEU, reported Sea-Intelligence.
The two Transpacific trades have a standard variance of around 50,000 TEU per week, whereas Asia-Mediterranean has a standard deviation of 34,000 TEU per week.
